Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 478, The Dynasty, Part 1.

If you're at all interested in U.S. politics, you've probably noticed that a few names

tend to come up consistently across the decades.

Names like Kennedy or Roosevelt or Bush have become fixtures of American political discourse, and often you'll hear

rumors about the family of a popular politician deciding to throw their own hats into the ring.

Political dynasties, as they're called, are nothing new. The U.S. and pretty much every other

democracy has had them from the jump, and from a certain

perspective, they make sense. As humans, we tend to judge people at least in part based on who

they know or are related to, hence the enduring importance of personal connections and networking

in, say, getting a job compared to deciding purely off resumes. It makes sense, regardless of what you think

of the practice, that we would extend that same logic to politics as well. Of course, the criticisms

of this kind of political dynasty are manifold. They enable corruption. They concentrate power

in the hands of a small elite. They undercut the notion of merit-based

elections. And of course, as the name itself implies, they're just a little bit too akin to the

old-school aristocracies that Democratic and Republican politics was supposed to get rid of.

And yet the phenomenon also doesn't appear to be going anywhere,

and so it behooves us to understand it. So over the next few weeks, we'll take a look at one of

the great political dynasties of Japan, one that has been there pretty much from the inception

of Japanese electoral politics. I refer, of course, to the Hatojamas, a name that rings large

across the history of Japanese politics and with very good reason. Between the very first general

election of 1890 and the one held in 2012, the vast majority of Japan's elections have had at least one Hatoyama standing for office in them,

and when that's happened, they've won more than they've lost.

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